Naomi Mitchison 1897-1999

Naomi Mitchison © David Black. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk

Writer, politician and matriarch

Naomi Mitchison was a magnificent writer according to Victor Gollancz, the 1930s radical publisher “…but filthy!”. Many would have agreed, shocked by the sexual openness of her life and work and with the vigour with which she pursued both.

She was born in 10 Moray Place, Edinburgh into a prosperous, well-connected family and thrived as the only girl in an academic prep school. But at puberty she was withdrawn to a governess’s care, escaping briefly to train as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse before entering what was to become an open marriage to Dick Mitchison.

Naomi travelled extensively and wrote about what she saw, expressing her political concerns and focussing on different ways of being a woman in a man’s world. All through the births of her seven children and on into her nineties she wrote prolifically: historical and contemporary novels, science fiction, children’s books, reviews, essays, memoirs, plays and poetry.

When war came she retreated to Carradale, the big family house, and devoted herself to farming, fishing, caring for the village’s evacuees and recording it all for Mass Observation (Among you Taking Notes ed. D. Sheridan). Afterwards her hopes for a reconciled, reinvigorated Scotland underpinned her major novel of Jacobite Scotland: The Bull Calves and much later writing.

She was a woman of action too, serving for years, both on the Argyll County Council and the Highland and Islands Panel, working tirelessly for the provision of Village Halls, a new harbour for Carradale and campaigning against the Polaris base in Scotland.